When I was a young man, the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance – the Trappists’ official name – was storied for its penitential practices. The monks’ days, which began at 2 a.m., were strictly measured by a schedule of manual labor punctuated by equally long hours of prayer and meditation on the Bible. Meals were spare portions of vegetarian fare. Communication was sign language; the human voice was rarely heard outside communal chapter meetings, where the brothers were urged to “proclaim” each other’s faults. On Friday mornings every monk took “the discipline,” flogging himself about the bare shoulders with knotted cords.
At night collected in unheated dormitories, sleeping in their wool habits on straw mats thrown over rough wooden planks. Showers were a luxury, and no monk took one without prior approval. With only one change of clothes, every monk lived in the knowledge that he was already wearing the hooded habit he’d be buried in. life, in short, was a daily crucifixion.
Today the Trappists’ life is less severe. At Holy Cross, each monk has his own small bedroom with a chair and desk. Curtained showers line the communal bathroom where the brothers share a supply of towels, razors and tubes of Crest. Meals are marginally more savory but still vegetarian. At dinner one evening, I join the monks for a supper of light salad, barley soup and monk’s bread dipped in honey thick with chunks of honeycomb. We eat in silence and wash our own dishes. Silence is still the norm, but it is no longer a fetish. Sign language isn’t used much anymore. You can talk too much with your hands, they learned, as well as by voice. “The point is to speak sparingly,” says Brother Benedict Simmonds. “We don’t want to interrupt a brother’s solitude with chatter.”
The spirit is different, too. In the six years they spend testing their call to the monastic life, novices who were once musicians, doctors or businessmen still must renounce whatever talent God may have given them. But, like the group of Buddhist monks from Tibet who recently visited Holy Cross, the Trappists now realize that discipline and self-denial are meant to liberate. Each Trappist abbey struggles to achieve a balance between work and prayer. And at the heart of both is the spirit of contemplation. “Contemplation aims at purity of heart,” Abbot Flavian Burns explains one afternoon. It is also the most difficult form of communing with God because it goes beyond images, beyond words, beyond even the most elevated thoughts. “Contemplation transcends purpose,” another monk advises me. “To begin to pray that way, you must first master the difficulty of doing nothing.”
The next morning, I reach automatically for the bedside radio that isn’t there. There is no television, either, no newspapers, none of the lines that wire the brain into a world of ceaseless sound and motion. There is only time. Time for reading spiritual books, for walks, for listening five times a day to the monks in choir, chanting the Psalms. Unlike Jesuits and other religious orders, these Trappists do not preach sermons to retreatants. In fact, guests seldom see the monks unless they ask. Quickly, I learned that Trappist hospitality consists chiefly in allowing us to do as the monk said – nothing. The hope is that in the stillness of our own solitude we may come through prayer to an awareness of God’s presence.
I try. But a journalist is indentured to words and images; abandoning them, I find, involves a kind of threshing of reality as I have come to know it. “Try talking with God, not to God,” yet another monk suggests. I try again. But all I experience are the symptoms of withdrawal from the self I have labored a lifetime to create – what the medieval Cistercians called “the land of unlikeness” hiding the true self that Scripture says is created in God’s image. By evening, though, I begin to feel almost elated by doing nothing. I can see that what is blocking me is my trying to make this weekend with the Trappists produce some practical result. Solitude, I come to understand, is a name for allowing God to speak.
I leave the monastery convinced that monks are ordinary men. They are not spiritual athletes, nor is the monastery a school for saints. It is simply a place where a few unworthy souls hope to reciprocate the gift of God’s love-with no guarantee of success. For them, the word of Jesus is promise enough: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”
